Walmart Labs Acquires Tech Start-up Torbit

by The City Wire Staff ([email protected]) 142 views 

Walmart Labs continues to expand in San Bruno, Calif., and confirmed with The City Wire on Wednesday (July 24) the acquisition of Torbit, a company that will help increase the speeds across all of its e-commerce platforms.

Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman for Walmart Labs, said Torbit is a front-end optimization platform that will help the retailer provide faster and smoother search processes regardless of whether the shopper is browsing from a mobile phone, tablet or computer.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Jariwala said four technology professionals with Torbit are joining the Walmart Labs team.

“We also continue to search for other technology engineers and have more than 100 jobs open at this time,” he said.

Torbit co-founder Jon Fox noted in a blog on Wednesday, “We’ll be using our cutting edge (Dynamic Content Optimization) technology to enhance the performance and shopping experience for all of Walmart.com’s many online shoppers. We’re excited to help make the Walmart online experience even better by optimizing for your device and improving the performance of all of their existing and future sites.”

Torbit joins a short list of other recent acquisitions by Walmart Labs including: Inkiru, OneOps and Tasty Labs, which are all part Wal-Mart’s efforts to operate in simultaneous retail channels.